Thursday, February 26, 2009

Paper exposes CPS

The Sacramento Bee has won two awards for its scrutiny of Sacramento County's Child Protective Services agency from the Northern California section of the Society of Professional Journalists.

The series of stories exposed bad work and policies like this:

Her work was described by top CPS management as "shoddy" and "totally inadequate," according to internal e-mails obtained by The Bee.

But those documents and recent interviews reveal a broader failure of the county's child protection system that reached into CPS management ranks – before and after the boy's July 21 death.

CPS officials, responding to questions from The Bee, recently acknowledged that a supervisor of social worker Adriane Miles did not scrutinize Miles' work in June as required, even though the original abuse complaint involving the boy was classified as an emergency.

The supervisor did not review any case documentation until the boy was dead – five weeks after the emergency referral.

And, at least two CPS supervisors went into the boy's case file after his death and altered the records before they were publicly released, a violation of the government code and Child Protective Services' written policy.